There is hysteria sweeping the country. It is the fear that AI, artificial intelligence, will pose a threat to humanity.
This is one of the most irrational iterations of hysteria I have ever seen. AI is really nothing more than the next generation of sophisticated search engine technology.
If there is something to fear with regards to AI, it is not the software. It is how people are defying AI.
Artificial intelligence is no different than the old days of Ask Jeeves, or Web Crawler, which all evolved into what we now use as Google search. Yes, AI has created a more humanistic front end where it can communicate in human language sentences.
But in reality it is doing no more than saving data and processing it in order to give answers. This humanistic communication reminds me of the old days of Adventure, Leather Goddess of Lobos and the Zork trilogy.
When people start to think that machines are thinking, that is irrational. Machines can do no more than we program them to do. Yes we can also program them to remember every conversation, every question, every phrase, every word in every language, that humans use. We can assign choices for these meetings and create algorithms for how the software puts them together. In AI terminology, this is large language modeling. But the terminology is irrelevant; it is still nothing more than data processing.
Some of the breaking news now is that some AI development companies are asking for government regulation. Nothing that government regulates ever benefits from that regulation. So, why would a company ask to be regulated by the government? This is actually a fairly easy question. If a company is regulated by the government, it will have two main effects.
First, if a company is failing to excel in its development, regulation can stymie its competition, giving it time to catch up. Second, if a company becomes regulated by the government and subsequently does harmful and destructive actions while complying with the regulations, it will shirk the legal liability for those actions.
Every American should be very alarmed that a company wants to be regulated. This isn’t about benefiting society, or humanity. This is about benefiting massive corporations whose intent is only to prosper at the expense of others.
As Americans, we believe in a free market. Let the free market function as it should. Don’t regulate AI beyond anything that is already covered in the United States constitution.
Allow the process to work.
C. Davis
Thurston County
